I know, I know, I said I wasn’t going to write about the UK political situation again. Let’s say I’m just using it as a convenient example of the importance of understanding the ABC’s of slogan design.

Despite the delusional politicians and media continuing their futile efforts to pin down the ‘root cause’ of the catastrophic performance of the Labour Party in the election, I’d like to add an additional contributing factor to the story.

Someone in the Conservative Party – in all probability taught by the Trump campaign team (or Steve Bannon) – understands ABC. No-one in or working for the Labour Party, sadly for them, appears to have the first clue.

Autonomy, Belonging and Competence are the three core human emotional drivers. Good slogan designs need to tap into as many of them as possible. A great slogan taps into all three. The perfect slogan taps into all three using three words. Three single syllable words.

Trump got somewhere close with the nine syllables he deployed to win the 2016 US election (https://www.darrellmann.com/nine-syllables-that-changed-the-world/).

The Conservatives came close with their four-syllable, ‘Take Back Control’ in the Brexit referendum. And this election they matched it with ‘Get Brexit Done’:

The Labour Party, on the other hand found themselves stuck with something akin to the antithesis of good slogan design, ‘For The Many Not The Few’, which maps onto the ABC story something like this:

No Autonomy connection, no Competence connection, and they somehow managed to get their Belonging words to cancel one another out. And they took seven syllables to do it.

Hopefully, someone tells them the ABC trick in the next five years. Or maybe make that ten, since its looking like it’s probably going to take the first five flushing out Corbynism. Maybe they could use their newfound slogan-writing skills to help with that job? Drain The Marx? Lock Marx Up? Just a thought.